Below are a few of the images I captured last night. The first photo below shows the how the full moon filled the frame with the lens at the equivalent of 1200mm. This photo was taken at 1/15 second at f/11 and ISO 200. The moon at night is quite bright and in constant motion. So, even an exposure of 1/15 second is rather slow and will blur a bit. The reason the moon is so bright is that it is being lit in a way similar to how light from the sun lights up the earth during the day. That's a lot of light. I was stuck with an aperture of f/11 because of the f/5.6 lens aperture at full extension coupled with a 2-stop loss from the 2X tele-extender.
The clouds are what made the situation interesting. As I mentioned, they were moving quite rapidly giving me plenty of opportunity to grab variations. Each shot I did, like the one below, where we can see both the clouds and the moon in their correct exposure required taking two photos and combining them together afterwards as layers in Photoshop.
The first shot was of the sky where the moon itself was overlit and completely blasted out. The exposure varied, but mostly it was around 1-second, f/11, and ISO 400. The second photo of the moon was at 1/15 sec, f/11, and ISO 200, but in this shot the clouds were too dark to see. That's why the final image had to be a combination of the two.
To make matters more interesting, both the moon and the clouds were moving rapidly so I had to capture both images with little time in between in order to keep the clouds and moon in their same relative positions. The procedure was: Take moon photo at 1/15 sec and ISO 200, then quickly change exposure to 1-second and ISO 400 for the cloud shot -- all the time giving the camera a couple of seconds to settle down after being handled for the change of exposure.
What is interesting about the photo above is that it was taken in one shot using the same exposure as for the clouds of 1-second, f/11, and ISO 400. The reason this was possible is that the moon in this photo is almost completely behind clouds, but it is so bright that its image is burning through the darker cloud parts of the cloud cover.
There were interesting variations in the color throughout the image. I didn't alter the actual colors, but did enhance them with LAB to intensify their color.
For me, this use of LAB color in Photoshop is the kind of moon shot that makes photography both fun and interesting -- but that's a story for another day.
